A Dream of Burning Sand (PC)

A Dream of Burning Sand is exactly the kind of lesser known game I like to spotlight here on The Game Hoard. This obscure Steam game has no Steam reviews at the time of writing despite being out for two years, has no videos covering it on Youtube besides a trailer, and no articles covering it anywhere on the web. Even the achievement stats implied that before I ever played it, the number of people who have actually experienced A Dream of Burning Sand outside of the people involved in its development was in the single digits. For a game the developer has said they spent almost five years making, it’s a shame to see an indie passion project receive so little attention. Hopefully with this review I can better help A Dream of Burning Sand leave an online footprint after all the time put into its development.

A Dream of Burning Sand begins with a girl named Nina who lives a fairly normal life. Heading home one night though, she is smashed into by a car, and while she survives, this accident lines up with an event taking place in a desert kingdom on a world far apart. The people of that world have suffered under the rule of The Burning King and his undead army for years, so a librarian named Amani attempts an invocation to bring a hero from another world to come defeat this tyrannical ruler. The person she ends up summoning instead though is Nina, and while she initially wants to go home immediately, soon Nina realizes she can possibly do good in this more fantastical world and agrees to venture out into the desert with Amani so she can face The Burning King.

The story-telling in A Dream of Burning Sand is perhaps its most effective element, the tale being told serving as the best part of making progress in the adventure. The game does not have The Burning King appear until much later in the game, giving the player time to see his impact on the world instead as you encounter refugees and find places devastated by his forces, but you even get to learn how he became who he is before the moment you come face to face with him. Nina and Amani’s growing relationship is also enjoyable to read, their perspectives as people from two different lives meaning they have different attitudes while still cooperating well together. Surprisingly the game has a lot of effective humor as well, and I found myself laughing at its jokes and unusual asides more than I expected to.

The game’s title refers to the fact that the desert world seems to be accessed by Nina falling asleep, this fantasy land perhaps only existing in her dreams and the nature of the adventure questioned at a few key points. The fact she is seemingly just dreaming means that she can die in the desert world again and again without repercussions though, only needing to stay in bed and drift off to be able to head back in for round two with her enemies. However, you can get up and do things around the hospital between deaths if you like, although there isn’t too much done with this portion of the gameplay. It is a shame because the music and the pushy hospital employees definitely imply there is something more going on with this half of the experience, but the music’s ominous tone is actually just part of the game’s struggles with matching its action with its music most of the time. Sometimes calm exploration will be backed by a theme with heavy metal instrumentation, and while there are hints of music fit for a game set in a desert, it does feel like A Dream of Burning Sand’s soundtrack is a better fit for a more action-packed title.

While the story can be good at parts, there are plenty of barriers in place to make remaining interested in it difficult. The save system is one of them, the game’s ability to save your spot at almost any place in the game seemingly a nice touch at first but not only does it make going for achievements difficult since you can’t duplicate a file, but it can lead to moments where you would much rather reset to some checkpoint earlier rather than be locked into where you actually were before you quit the game. This is mostly because the majority of A Dream of Burning Sand is not about its story or action, but it is instead about a lot of walking. So many locations are much bigger than they have any need to be, with this sidescroller’s view of the characters incredibly zoomed out just to show you how empty much of the area you’re heading towards is. There are definitely portions where you could possibly justify these long stretches that take far too long even when running, such as a moment near the end where you’re nearing the Burning King’s city so the long walk can be a tense build-up. However, almost every exterior area is needlessly large with almost nothing to do besides walk forward. It can even be hard to tell if you’re going the right direction sometimes since there is nothing but empty space before you, but then you might spot an enemy and realize that yes, that abnormally long stroll is in fact a required part of progress.

Interior spaces can be huge as well, but they get even more complex as they often include staircases and doors. If A Dream of Burning Sand was a 3D game these sections would be much more navigable since they’d make more sense than horizontal hallways attached by a variety of entrances, but keeping track of all similar rooms and the doors you enter with no map to help with the effort is confusing and tedious. In some areas Nina will at least have a thought bubble that can nudge the player in the right direction if you stand still for a bit, but in others she’ll be silent and leave the player with no clue on what they’re meant to be doing or where they should go. The game gives off a bad impression when the first area in the desert world is the large maze of a library Amani works in, and while this might be because a realistic sense of size was desired in much the same way there are plenty of books to read that hold no purpose beyond adding color to the setting, it only gets worse as things progress. There are maze-like sewers and catacombs that have no light beyond a small lantern you can carry, and while you can take a potion to see a bit better in these portions, it is time-limited and doesn’t have much range. Add to this plenty of enemies or hazards in the dark and these segments couple the long and twisted navigation segments with surprise dangers that make them more frustrating.

A lot of time playing A Dream of Burning Sand is wasted running through barren environments or bumbling through intricate mazes of doorways and staircases, but there are the rare segments where the game shows it can concoct some interesting platform challenges. One portion features an area in the library that changes to match the contents of the books you read, and another has you in a dark room where the only way to figure out where some platforms are is to watch the glowing green acid drops splash against the surfaces in the dark. Sidequests are unfortunately rather basic and rarely rewarding, often taking the form of delivering letters or speaking to one character after another, but they do sometimes provide a little cash so you can buy a shield or the power-enhancing potions for the combat sections.

Unfortunately, the combat sections are rather crude, your swing having a very specific range at which it can deal damage and your shield only defending if the enemy is a certain distance away from you. Enemies like to run in and make it so your sword will miss but their weapons will deal their damage, and while you have a backwards leap, it’s hardly fit for quick dodging. Instead, it’s most likely going to come down to you and the enemy jumping around and trying to have the attack ranges line up for some decent damage, but if the foe you’re fighting is someone like a skeleton swordsman, it often has backup that invalidates much of the tactical options for a fight. You can’t really manage a group well since they like to cluster together in a way where your attack won’t hurt them all but you’ll be left vulnerable after you land, and they can often deal much greater damage than you can even if you’ve got a strength and defense potion to enhance those stats. A healing potion exists but navigating the inventory in a fight usually requires shaking the persistent foes for a few seconds which isn’t always easy to do, but at least the deaths will always be undone by staying in bed. Some segments at least make fighting an enemy less of a drawn out duel, and learning how to bait a fly into approaching you the right way or sidestepping a spider as it lowers down from above shows a more acceptable integration of action into this platformer. Any devoted fight section though can quickly slip into Nina being outmatched simply because her attack method tends to leave her vulnerable unless your timing is spot on.

There are a few other gameplay styles to be found in A Dream of Burning Sand. Sometimes you’ll be riding on horseback, the player needing to manage their speed and leap over dangers to keep up the pace but this can also feel like it lasts too long as well. Nina’s cell phone while awake allows her to play a decent little maze game called Zynx where you need to collect dots while avoiding enemies with different behavioral patterns, but this minor minigame is hardly going to influence the overall experience’s quality. Instead, much of the adventure feels like a slog as time is spent running about, sometimes without a totally clear idea of which direction you should be going. These long portions of exploration can also contain some rather cruel design decisions like jumps over pits that, should you fall, will force you to cover a long stretch of familiar ground just to get the chance to try again, and even the more novel puzzle concepts you encounter while exploring are sadly weakened by the fact that it will involve far too much legwork to actually solve those intriguing challenges.

THE VERDICT: A Dream of Burning Sand’s simple story can balance emotion, world-building, and humor rather well, but its hard to remain invested in the tale of Nina and Amani when you only get bits of it between befuddling mazes and long periods of pointless walking. Areas are often far too large for how little you can do in them, their design makes it easy to get lost, and even when you’re running at full speed, just moving around a space takes far too much time. When you’re not running along a large barren stretch of land, struggling with dark dungeons, or trying to learn perplexing interior layouts, the fights still make things hard to stomach with how easy it is to get overwhelmed while barely having the means to fight back competently yourself. While the plot could have been appealing in a more condensed experience, A Dream of Burning Sand is unfortunately an experience dominated by tedium and frustration.

And so, I give A Dream of Burning Sand for PC…

A TERRIBLE rating. I didn’t want to be so harsh on this game that has hardly any attention, but A Dream of Burning Sand has been stretched to the point of breaking and then some. If everything was condensed down massively the game’s environments would be much more tolerable, although the maze-like orientations of almost every interior space of decent size would definitely need reworking as well. A Dream of Burning Sand does sometimes show it has good idea for platforming and navigation challenges, but between these bright flickers of inspiration are the doldrums of running through a large open space with nothing to do in it or a building where getting around involves crafting a mental map of identical spaces and multiple floors through unexciting exploration. Adding darkness into many of these spaces just makes a game that already is harmed by its visual design struggle even more, and perhaps the canvas of a PC monitor was too big for A Dream of Burning Sand. That extra space sometimes leads to lovely starlit backgrounds or a good view of a city or mural, but more often it is either wide and empty or filled with more doors to rooms that sometimes don’t even serve a purpose. There’s even a rather annoying quirk with jumping where each time you land comes with the smallest of camera lurches to make playing it just a touch more disorienting than it already is. Even if everything was squashed down into a more concise experience, Nina’s combat capabilities are still rarely enjoyable to use, the only foes who are decent to fight being ones you can kill in one slash once you learn how to bait them into approaching. Anything that comes in a group or can take a few hits will inevitably press against the issues with attack detection, with slimes sometimes as fearsome as ghouls or skeletons simply because you aren’t really built to handle a fight that has any degree of complexity to it.

The negativity here is an unfortunate byproduct of an honest evaluation, and even the story’s upsides can’t really outshine the issues on show. However, at least now there is something out there to talk about this game. I uploaded almost every screenshot I took of the game to the Steam community and submitted it to Mobygames’s video games database to help ensure that there is more information to find about this game online. Now A Dream of Burning Sand will be put out there in front of more eyes, so maybe it can start to accrue a bit more attention. To experience a video game’s unique vision and ideas, no matter the quality of the title or how it executes that vision, still fascinates me even after playing so many different games. I can’t recommend A Dream of Burning Sand, but I am glad I got to play it and I hope this review can at least ensure it isn’t totally lost to the sands of time.